1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of multi-channel slotted ring networks and, more particularly, to a multi-priority Media Access Control (MAC) method for a multi-channel slotted ring network, such as the Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) slotted ring network.
2. Description of Related Art
In optical networks, WDM technology provides one means to utilize the potentially huge fiber optic bandwidth, WDM is generally used to divide fiber optic bandwidths into a number of channels whose rates match the speeds of the electronic interface. Clearly, a network explored by WDM technology is a multiple channel network.
Because of the huge bandwidth of WDM technology, many efforts based on this technology are made to provide new transmission protocols on different topologies, such as ring, star, tree and mesh. Among these topologies, the ring topology is commonly used in access networks and metropolitan area networks (MANs).
Nowadays, since the Internet is in widespread use, the types of network applications are diverse. A noticeable application is the transmission of multimedia or real-time data, such as video or voice data. In order to let the transmission of real-time data satisfy its deadline, the transmission priority of real-time data must be higher than the priority of non real-time data. The transmission protocols of multi-media data are not suitable for real-time data without differentiating between data streams according to their priorities or reserving bandwidth due to its real-time property. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a method capable of supporting multi-priority transmission in the WDM network environment.